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Nationalism and Democracy in the British Commonwealth: Some General Trends
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
Extract
The two dynamic political forces in the British Commonwealth are those of nationalism and democracy, and they are in close alliance. This fact is most evident in the older dominions, which were colonized from the British Isles, or, in the case of Canada and South Africa, partially colonized also from France and Holland. The genesis of their nationality was evident when as colonies they gropingly aspired to become autonomous political communities, standing on their own feet, seeking to shape their own future, not isolated from the metropolitan power, but also not subservient to it. In them the prevailing concept of a nation has been that of a people organized to achieve within the state the ends of popular freedom and political order. Owing to the liberating and levelling ways of the frontier, a new land provided special scope for the ideas and sentiments of democracy and hence the more readily generated among the people a potent sentiment for itself.
- Type
- The British Commonwealth: A Symposium
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © American Political Science Association 1953
References
1 A brief comment on nomenclature is relevant to a discussion of the modern British Commonwealth. The simple term “Commonwealth” is now coming to replace “British Commonwealth,” and in the Queen's titles, as recommended by the dominion Prime Ministers in December, 1952, it received explicit sanction. But the adjective will always be useful in order to avoid ambiguity. The term “dominion” to designate a fully self-governing member of the Commonwealth is in some official circles now avoided, but in the absence of an adequate substitute its convenience is obvious. In this article my concern is only with the full member states of the Commonwealth, but a related theme of immense interest is that of the emergent nationalities of the African colonies, which afford comparison and contrast with the nationalities of the dominions.
2 Contradictions appear in Gandhi's social thinking. Despite his attack on the system of untouchability, he defended in certain writings the Hindu system of hereditary caste and hereditary occupations. He usually offered subtle reasons for his distinctions, but the working of his mind often made the more Western type of democrat, like Pandit Nehru, impatient, as the latter candidly admits in his Autobiography.
3 Saiyidain, H. G., Naik, J. P., and Husain, S. Abid, Compulsory Education in India (UNESCO, 1952)Google Scholar.
4 See his article “Basic Conflicts in Indian Politics,” The Hindu, 01 26, 1950Google Scholar.
5 In October, 1951 one of the able founders of Pakistan, the Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, was the victim of an assassin's bullet, and in the subsequent months civil disorders multiplied.
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